Planeswalker's Scorn

Removal that prices itself off your opponent's hand, which is a strange and underexplored axis. The kill is metered by randomness: you pay the activation, your opponent flips a card from their hand at random, and the creature shrinks by exactly that card's mana value. Reveal a land and you wasted the mana; reveal their bomb and you trade a repeatable activation for it. The design folds two ideas together that black usually keeps separate, point removal and hand disruption, by making the second the engine for the first. It does not strip the card, but it reads the card, and a hellbent opponent simply turns the enchantment off. The friction is doubled: a steep recurring cost gated to sorcery speed, then the dice on top of that. What you are actually buying is an attrition tool that gets better the longer the game runs and the fuller your opponent's hand stays, which is the opposite of how most removal wants the board to look. It belongs to that early-century lineage of black enchantments that wanted to win by inevitability rather than tempo, the slow grind that outlasts a deck rather than racing it, where the variance was part of the texture rather than a flaw to be sanded out. Modern black removal abandoned this kind of randomized, repeatable shrink almost entirely; the cleaner the era's design got, the less room there was for a card whose answer depended on a coin flip you handed your opponent.